I have the privilege now of offering some words of Torah, reflecting on the same parashah, the same Torah portion Max will speak about tomorrow, as he shares with you all, his community, his process of Yisrael — of wrestling with God, as that word means, wrestling with God’s words as reflected in Torah, engaging in the lifelong process of what it means to be Jewish—both being impacted by and influencing ourselves the stream of tradition.
Max will be speaking about the Torah portion known as Lekh Lekhah. Lekh lekhah is the third portion in the entire Torah, and it signals a shift from God operating on a universal scale—the creation of the world, the story of the flood, the populating of all the earth—to an intimate scale, where we zoom in from the transcendent to the experience of one particular community, and really one particular person.
That person is Abraham or, Abram as he is initially called, and the Torah portion lekh lekhah, begins with Adonai saying to Avram לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
Abram is being told to go forth, from your native land—where you’re from, what you know; and from your father’s house—from where all your family connections are, all your roots; to the land the I will show you—and you don’t even know where you’re going. You’re just going to go. And I’ll let you know when you get there.
And what does Abram do? He goes.וַיֵּ֣לֶךְ אַבְרָ֗ם כַּאֲשֶׁ֨ר דִּבֶּ֤ר אֵלָיו֙ יְהֹוָ֔ה Abram went forth as Adonai had commanded him.
This is now understood to be the paradigmatic “leap of faith” in Jewish tradition, by someone who is in some ways most characterized by this notion of leaps of faith.
It was Abraham who just a few chapters later in parashat vayera is the one to whom God says קַח־נָ֠א אֶת־בִּנְךָ֨ “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.”
Abraham’s response? In the very next verse we read וַיַּשְׁכֵּ֨ם אַבְרָהָ֜ם בַּבֹּ֗קֶר early next morning, Abraham saddled his donkey and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him.
Ambivalent as we might be about this choice, Abraham is, in many senses of the word, the ultimate man of faith. At multiple turning points in life he demonstrates his supreme faith through his actions
And yet faith is a word we Jews struggle with.
Christians appear to be very comfortable with the word “faith” in a couple of respects.
For starters, for many christians, and for many English-speaking Americans the word “faith” is simply synonymous with the word religion. “My christian faith tells me I need to love my neighbor.” “Every faith teaches its followers to be kind.” “He established a reputation as a steadfast defender of the Catholic faith.”
We Jews, unless we’re borrowing from contemporary usage — do not tend to refer to our “Jewish faith,” even while the notion of “faith” is clearly present in our biblical roots.
Even so, even if we’re not talking about using the word faith as a synonym for religion, but rather faith in something, even while that’s present in some sense in our biblical roots, it doesn’t seem to hold the same contemporary emphasis that it does in christianity or in other understandings of religion. “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God,” it says in the New Testament book of Romans. I know very little about christian theology, but we know the emphasis christianity places on faith.
What about Jews? How does the example of Abraham hold out the role of “faith” in Jewish life, and what role does it play in our lives?
As scholar Louis Jacob points out, when the Torah uses the Hebrew word for faith, “emunah,” it is rarely if ever talking simply about whether or not one believes in God. That was taken as a given in ancient times. As he writes, “hardly anyone in biblical and rabbinic times doubted that God (or the Gods) existed.” “Atheism,” he says, “was virtually unknown.”
Rather he says, in biblical and rabbinic literature, faith was really about trust. Sure we believe in God, the ancients effectively said. But what does that mean for us? What is our emotional and behavioral response to that belief? Do we trust in the relationship, and what does that mean?
When I think about faith, trust in this cosmic sense, a few things come to mind.
First, faith in what? For us, for me, yes there is the capacity for faith in God, but what does that mean?
Does it mean everything always works out for the best? We know, at least on a material level, what we’re able to bear witness to, that is not how the world works—we see innocent people die, get taken hostage, all sorts of terrible things.
Faith that everything always happens for a reason? If so, sometimes those reasons can be all but impossible to discern. The premature cancer death, the suffering we encounter.
Rather, for me, faith is about an ultimate source of goodness in the universe even if it’s not operating on a timeline that we would recognize.
Judaism believes in what we call a redemptive age—olam ha’ba, the world to come. Fundamentally, this belief implies that the present world, the world we encounter, contains brokenness. We are not there yet. The notion of olam ha’ba, to me, lays out an aspirational marker for where we can be.
וְכִתְּת֨וּ חַרְבוֹתָ֜ם And they shall beat their swords into plowshares their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up Sword against nation; They shall never again know war.
וְהֵשִׁ֤יב לֵב־אָבוֹת֙ עַל־בָּנִ֔ים וְלֵ֥ב בָּנִ֖ים עַל־אֲבוֹתָ֑ם Elijah shall reconcile parents with children and children with their parents
בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֗וּא יִהְיֶ֧ה יְהֹוָ֛ה אֶחָ֖ד וּשְׁמ֥וֹ אֶחָֽד׃ On that day the oneness from which we all flow will be recognized as such.
These are all biblical references to what the world can, and we pray will, look like. So faith in this sense, in this Jewish context, is about faith in what the world can be when it is whole, even if it is broken now.
What is further noteworthy is that,In each of these passing imaginings of what the world can look like, faith in what the world can be, human action is contemplated : Nations will turn their swords into plowshares; a person will help reconcile the hearts of estranged parents and children; people will affirm that they are all connected, that they all flow from the same source.
Faith, in Jewish tradition, calls upon each of us to help do our part to bring about this olam ha’ba this world to come. Faith, in Judaism, is in part a belief in what is possible, through our actions.
Interestingly, as some of you know we are experiencing just a little bit of olam ha’ba, the world to come, right now.
That is because Shabbat, in Jewish tradition, is considered m’ein haolam habah. “The world to come is characterized by the kind of holiness possessed by Shabbat.”
In other words, we don’t have to wait for a future redemptive age to experience a little bit of what olam haba, a more perfected world, can taste like.
On Shabbat, here with our families, with our communities, we’re invited to experience a sense of faith not just in what can be, but in what is.
On Shabbat we’re invited to experience faith in what we’re experiencing right now—that this, even if just in this fleeting moment, is olam habah, a taste of wholeness, and holiness.
On Shabbat, we’re invited to experience faith in our ability to love, to connect, to bring light into the world.
On shabbat we’re invited to experience faith in our capacity for a relationship between ourselves and the divine, however we understand that, and the strength and support that our hearts can feel, even in the most trying of times, through that relationship.
It’s a relationship revealed to and by Abraham in his lekh lekhah moment. “Go forth,” he understood himself to be called. He had faith in the call that he heard and the source of it, a call which prompted him to act. May we all have such faith. Shabbat Shalom.